Startegy is a website design and SEO company that supports a full range of business services and solutions online including web design, development, marketing and custom computer hardware. A innovation station if you will.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

My Favorite SEO Tools - Professional Picks

Since there are many good tools to conduct SEO / SEM campaigns, I felt like sharing some of my favorites, and in doing so, I believe they are the best in the industry. I hear from many SEO professionals that getting a good sampling of keyword search stats comes down to the use of a tool like wordtracker, and while it is useful, it doesn't quite have the right feel for me. To collect the searches conducted on a term or "like" term, I use Yahoo! /Overture's Keyword tool instead of wordtracker. The searches performed can be compaired against a search done in MSN, Yahoo! or Google to get the success factor by comparing the ratio of competitive results to searches performed per month. Obviously, the more searches performed to the least competitive results, is what any good SEO looks for.

For link building campaigns or determining the history of links from a site / client, I like the link reputation tool. It can be slow at times, but overall, I do find it useful and enlightening. Furthermore, Seochat's Pagerank search can be used to find high pageranked sites that are link building opportunities. The best part about this is that Seochat publishes a plethora of useful tools, all in one spot.

Other tools include:

Don't have or want the Google toolbar? Use Seochat's Pagerank Lookup.Want to get your site up to par with SEO like symantic structure and "rules", try sitening's SEO analyser (a definite killer app) . Honorable mention does go to the developers of another SEO analyser which with a little more tweaking, might catch up to Sitening's tool.Looking to see how many pages of your site or client site are indexed by the major engines? Try the index report tool.To find a list of robots crawling websites, check out the robots list.Dont necessarily want the robot list, but do want the robot user agents?An alternative to Seochat's link popularity tool is this one.

In conclusion, these tools make the process of acquiring SEO statistics and data, easier and allow for a more complete "picture" or the situation you are facing in your optimization battles. Use them, they will definately help and provide a way to track results.